Brexit: International views

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While the British media pores over, analyses, and pulls apart every second of the past seven days, what do those outside the UK make of events?

Look no further – CNC has compiled a grab bag of articles from across Europe and around the world, each providing a different perspective on the impact of Brexit.

The view from Brussels:

Belgium’s Flemish-language media has slated referenda as the blunt tool of democratic spectacle in Europe. De Standaard writes that, in such campaigns, facts are subordinated to beliefs, and rational arguments to emotions.

In France, Le Monde commented on the “incredible unpreparedness of Boris Johnson” and the sudden urge not to move hastily. The paper quotes Alistair Darling’s summary of the situation in the 2008 financial crisis: “We’ve got no government, no opposition. The people who put us in this mess have fled.”

In The Netherlands, Prime Minister Rutte warned the EU not to react by focusing on the big reform plans that France, Italy, Portugal and Greece have in mind, but instead to deliver on promises already made. Europe must concentrate on growth and security, and address people’s sense that they are part of something enormous they cannot control:

In Sweden, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven shut the door on the Leave campaign’s demands for free access to the European single market without free EU migration. “They want to have rights but no obligations. It will not happen.”

In Austria, the finance and foreign minister announced plans to woo London-based international firms and organisations to Vienna. Die Presse reports on their planned roadshow to London in September, supported by advertising and social media campaigns.

Economists at the Summer Davos World Economic Forum in China expressed the view that Brexit will weaken the euro’s status and gives the Chinese yuan an opportunity to become a more ‘internationalised currency’. Furthermore, a senior international market researcher at the Ministry of Commerce stated that Brexit has made the UK less attractive to Chinese companies.

In Japan, the government worries that Brexit could deal a body blow to ‘Abenomics’ – Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s troubled flagship economic policy. There are fears the vote could throw the virtuous circle of a soft yen and rising stock prices into reverse.

The United Arab Emirates is home to many expats, and an important economic partner for the UK – so it comes as no surprise the Emirati media has been tracking Brexit news, closely reporting on events from the British Isles. However, it was the Romanian’s sympathetic response to the Brexit vote which particularly caught their eye.

Switzerland’s Federal Council is ‘dumbfounded,’ according to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. The paper emphasised Brexit’s significant ramifications for Switzerland’s 2014 freedom of movement and residence agreement with the EU and the current Swiss need for some post-Brexit direction from the country’s ‘Bundesrat’.